Two deliberate cases of forging Bank of England notes about this time may be mentioned, although neither of the criminals passed through Newgate. One was James Elliot, who suffered at Maidstone in 1777, the other Joshua Crompton, who was executed at Gangley Green, near Guildford, in 1778.
The circulation of counterfeit paper was not the only kind of monetary fraud in vogue. The coinage of the realm still suffered. Clipping could not be quite put down by act of Parliament. The punishment was still capital, and generally inflicted without hope of reprieve. It was a crime affected more particularly by workers in the precious metals. Thus John Clarke, in 1767, was a London watch-case maker of good repute, who was in the habit of working alone in a private closet. His apprentice, jealously suspecting him to be engaged in some secret branch of his trade, bored a hole through the wainscot, and caught his master filing guineas. The apprentice immediately informed; Clarke was arrested, convicted, and soon afterwards hanged.
Persons in a higher station, however, succumbed to special temptations. William Guest was the son of a clergyman living at Worcester, who had sufficient interest to get him a clerkship in the Bank of England. The constant handling of piles of gold was too much for Guest's integrity, and he presently resolved to turn his opportunities to account. Taking a house in Broad Street Buildings, he devoted the upper part of it to his nefarious trade. He abstracted guineas from his drawer in the Bank, carried them home, filed them, then remilled them in a machine he had designed for the purpose, and returned them--now light weight--to the Bank. The filings he converted into ingots and disposed of to the trade. No suspicion of his malpractices transpiring, he was in due course advanced to the post of teller. But a fellow-teller having observed him one day picking out new guineas from a bag, watched him, and found that he did this constantly. On another occasion he was seen to pay away guineas some of which, on examination, proved to have been recently filed. They were weighed, and found short weight. To test Mr. Guest still further, his money-bags were opened one night after hours, and the contents counted and examined. The number was short, and several guineas found which appeared to have been recently filed, and which on weighing proved to be light.